Available on: Tectonic 12″

‘Blood Music’

Manchester’s Illum Sphere is rapidly gaining a reputation as one of the more out there producers operating in the UK underground. For the title track of this new single on Tectonic he attempts to blend future beats and bass with the kind of Celtic string arrangements usually found in one of Liam Neeson’s historical epics. It’s certainly ambitious, but, as with earlier attempts to meld ceilidh and club sounds (e.g. Afro-Celt Sound System), ultimately a little disjointed, even with its head-noddingly funky “Illum plays it cool” coda.

The disjointedness of ‘Blood Music’ on the flip side, however, is quite something else: loose, jazzy and quite, quite superb. The interplay between the uncanny choir sample in the high frequencies and the bellowing voice sample in the lows is simply fantastic. The Indigo remix of ‘Blood Music’ may not hit the same heights, but it’s no dud either. Spacey synth washes, rolling sub bass and fizzing, dextrous beats combine to create an evocative alternative vision of the track, one more suited to late night contemplation that dancefloor perspiration.

Justin Toland